Tuning In: Torey Champagne's documentary remembers Reggie Lewis

Torey Champagne vividly remembers watching the Celtics’ 1993 playoff game on television with his father at their Leicester home when his favorite player, Reggie Lewis, stumbled and fell to the floor.

The young Celtics star was diagnosed with a serious heart condition and three months later he died while shooting baskets with a friend at Brandeis University, where the Celtics used to train. He was only 27 years old.

At 8 p.m. Sunday, Champagne will be in front of the television with his father again, this time at his Auburn home with his wife and mother to view the 90-minute documentary that Champagne made for CSNNE to honor the 20th anniversary of Lewis’ death, “Remember Reggie: The Reggie Lewis Story.” The program will air 20 years and one day after Lewis died.

Champagne, 34, had just completed his freshman year at Leicester High when Lewis died. Champagne and his summer league basketball teammates wrote Lewis’ No. 35 on their sneakers and taped No. 35 to their uniforms to honor him.

“To be in a position 20 years later,” Champagne said, “to direct a film like this is really, really special.”

Glenn Ordway narrates the documentary, which features interviews, some of them tearful, with Lewis’ former teammates and coaches at Dunbar High in Baltimore, Northeastern University and the Celtics, as well as journalists who covered him.

“It was an emotional experience,” Champagne said, “sitting across from these people and asking them tough questions and getting them to talk about the aftermath of his death along with the days leading up to his death and the events that took place.”

Long before Lewis averaged 20.8 points in each of his final two seasons with the Celtics, he was a skinny backup on the unbeaten Dunbar High teams that featured future NBA players Muggsy Bogues, Reggie Williams and David Wingate. In Baltimore, Lewis earned the nickname as the greatest sixth man of all time.

Champagne also came off the bench for his Leicester High basketball team, but not as often as Lewis. Champagne scored only six points in his high school career, but he did play some.

“If Reggie was the greatest sixth man of all time,” Champagne said, “I was the greatest 12th man of all time.”

More than a dozen people worked on the documentary, but Champagne served as not only the producer, but the director, writer and editor. The seven-month project wasn’t finished until Monday.

“We just wanted to make sure we got it right,” he said.

The documentary details Lewis’ childhood in Baltimore and his time in Boston playing basketball for Northeastern and the Celtics.

“Once I met his mom, that’s when it really hit home for me,” Champagne said. “Like, wow, this is somebody’s son whose name has kind of been forgotten and he was a great man. I tried to make the best film I possibly could to honor him.”

While working on the documentary, Champagne was surprised how loved and respected Lewis still is in his hometown of East Baltimore. But they still know him by his boyhood nickname of “Truck.”

After a dream team of doctors diagnosed Lewis with a career-ending structural defect in his heart, he received a far more favorable second opinion from Dr. Gilbert Mudge, who assured him he’d be able to play again. A few months later, Lewis was dead and the Celtics took many years to recover. Champagne reached out to about 50 people for interviews, but Dr. Mudge and Lewis’ wife, Donna, both declined.

“We respected their decision,” Champagne said. “I can’t imagine what it must be like being in Donna’s shoes, but we still felt it was important to make the film.”

Two years after Lewis died, the Wall Street Journal published a story saying that physicians suspected cocaine use may have caused his death. The documentary interviewed the Wall Street Journal reporter and medical experts who agreed and disagreed with the story.

“I felt it very important to get everybody’s perspective,” Champagne said, “and let them speak for what they knew and what they were involved in, rather than trying to come to a conclusion. I just let it be. I felt it was fair to Reggie, his family and friends and to the people that were inside the situation.”

Twenty years after Lewis’ death, younger sports fans may know of him only because they’ve competed in the Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center, which was named after him in Roxbury. Champagne hopes his documentary reminds fans of what Lewis accomplished.

Contact Bill Doyle at wdoyle@telegram.com. Follow him on Twitter @BillDoyle15.